Pharmanager Health Systems

Africa has not built a defined healthcare infrastructure that empowers the different stakeholders of the healthcare industry with plug-and-play rails to build their practice on. Most healthcare interventions are usually focused on patients and are not sustainable over long periods due to lack of continuity or being stand alone projects. Even donor programs are often localized to geographies or specialization intent. 

Accessibility and affordability problem for patients: Clinical onboarding for patients usually involve payment discussions, clinical questioning etc. We need to build systems that allows this step to be as short as possible to proceed to treatment. Every patient should be easily identifiable with their health history and payment plan to receive healthcare. We have channels for patients to purchase health plans and medications, book appointments with providers within the Pharmanager network.

Internal and external support for providers and payers: We have software and financing schemes for providers to manage their practice and collaborate with other providers and payers on patient (data) and procurement needs. Nigeria has 1:10000 doctor to patient ratio which shows the importance of having all hands on deck as regards collaboration among healthcare providers to collaborate more on delivering better outcomes. 

Wholesale distribution: This is very important considering the counterfeit drug problem so providers plugging directly to verified suppliers or manufacturers is a good step. We have onboarded foreign manufactures to provide them with consulting services for product registration, distribution and market intelligence.

Pharmanager is a health system designed for end-to-end delivery of healthcare services.

1. Software- We have building proprietary software for provider internal management and external collaboration

a. Pharmanager for Pharmacies: Built with POS sales and prescription manager and inventory management tools Pharmacies can also issue procurement orders for their supplies.

b. Pharmanager Investigation for Laboratories: Manage tests and investigations for pathology and diagnostic imaging labs. Labs can also get bookings from partner hospitals.

c. Pharmanager Prescriptions for Hospitals: Write prescriptions and other aspects of patient care. Create patient notes and manage vitals analytics.

d. Pharmanager Patient app: Patients can purchase health plans and medications, book appointments with providers within the Pharmanager network.

e. Pharmanager partnerships: Providers and payers (e.g. donors) can seek to partner with each other on delivery collaboration e.g. lab and hospital partnership, wearables or NGO partnering with another provider.

f. Pharmanager for Payers: Payers of healthcare e.g. employers, HMOs, and NGOs require a channel to manage claims, enrollees and payments in relation to the providers of healthcare.

2. Procurement support: We help providers purchase supplies from manufacturers, offering our logistics and financing options. 

Healthcare stakeholders especially providers. Our solution is designed to enhance the work of people who deliver services in the healthcare industry. Healthcare providers do not have support systems to that while a healthcare firm may have a good business, there may be industry risks that still affects the entire industry that cannot be mitigated against. A problem is lack of collaboration among the different stakeholders in the sector. For example, insights gathering where providers can partner with pharma or biotech research organization to allow real population data for market intelligence purposes or marketing visibility for distributors and manufacturers.

Our solution will help them to combine internal business management solution with room for external partnerships for procurement and patient data transfer. A patient at an hospital can have their prescriptions transferred to a pharmacy closer to them.  

The biggest drug market in Nigeria is in my community in Lagos Island with relatives who are quite ingrained with the health sector. Infact, we are planning an exhibition in April with the Association of General and Private Medical Practitioners, Lagos to showcase our health system solution to about 3000 healthcare providers. We have met with scientists in pathology and radiology and the common trend among all healthcare providers is the desire to go digital and their desire to consolidate business activity that leads to higher revenues. 

The most profitable part of healthcare is medical supplies procurement and the economic situation of the country is driving a shift towards a survival mindset as they are a business first and foremost. The cross side problem from patients is that the economic hardship in the country has impacted the most reliable source of healthcare payments - out of pocket payments, even though healthcare is a critical necessity. A less expensive health plan for health safety net through an insurance underwriter would do wonders in the market and bring more volume to providers as healthcare is a volume based business.

While the software is not live yet, our services to manufacturers for product registration with NAFDAC and sales have commenced. We have onboarded 15 of them from Europe and South east Asia (India, Bangladesh, Vietnam) focusing of drugs like anti-malarial, anti-bacterial, anti-biotics, anti-diabetics, anti-hypertensive, oncology drugs, anti-inflammatories, analgesics, anti-coagulants, laboratory reagents, cold storage systems.

What this means is that providers and patients in our network will have access to supplies at competitive rates and some supplies with better innovative breakthroughs. 

A manufacturer of pile drugs reach out as regards medical formulations for pile treatment compared to the traditional surgical approach to treatment which represents a 10x breakthrough. These are the types of access to improved healthcare that our scheme will have to Nigerians.

1. Health systems are rigid frameworks that its failure can impact national security and productivity over a small time frame. We would like to work with advanced technological protocols to ensure success.

2. Our pharmanager marketplace product needs more external visibility to indirect providers of healthcare e.g. biotech companies, pharma and genomics research organizations, digital tools startups, hardware and deeptech companies, NGOs and donors, who are looking to contribute to public health initiatives, gain business intelligence and supply chain support can partner with local providers to execute their own goals and objectives. Solve will give us the network to meet stakeholders in the healthcare space to facilitate local business partnerships for Nigerian healthcare providers.

Part of the main problem of African healthcare is the 

a. absence of plug-and-play infrastructure that dictates standards for providers while providing support systems for their practice

b. patient universality in the system. 

Our innovative approach helps 

a. providers join a network of providers guided by defined protocols across IT, supply chain, financing and collaboration. This would allow providers to

i. IT: Use a open source software to manage patient data and that data is transferable across provider type and locations on patient request. A provider (hospital) can book an appointment for a patient at another provider (laboratory) all paid for by an HMO the patient or its employer bought on the patient app or partnership platform respectively.

II. Supply chain: Providers can use our third party supply to stock medical inventory bought from us directly or other third party. A financing option is currently being arranged to finance the sales on credit for providers as Healthcare provider loan.

iiI. Collaboration: Providers can collaborate to bring value to themselves and further their internal objectives. For example, a biotech firm can reach out to a lab in Nigeria to get market intelligence using genomic data for Africa to be used in their R&D.

The bigger impact of our approach creation of a resilient healthcare ecosystem for Nigerians in such that regardless of where they are, they will always have access to healthcare.

To build resilient health system, the first solution is to solve structural problems. Healthcare is a volume business with several players working together to deliver population based outcomes. Several structural guidelines must be put in place and adhered to bring changes to the healthcare systems. This is why America built ObamaCare, MedicAid, Social security, all of which were designed to enhance structural changes to deliver population wide results.

Pharmanager is positioned to be a plug-and-play infrastructure for all providers to leverage its rails in the healthcare ecosystem across functions like software, collaboration and partnership, procurement support, regulatory compliance, market intelligence support and eventually financing. For example, we’ve had several pharmaceutical manufacturers reach out to us about wanting to register their product and sell in Nigeria. With our protocol, we have began product registration and in the aftermath of that they will sales access via providers, sales representatives etc. to showcase and distribute their products. They as the provider get to make sales, the hospitals and pharmacies get better and faster service and product delivery and the patients have better overall health quality. Doing this at scale, may even lead to reduction in product prices as we will allow competition among the different stakeholders.

The two most important impact goals pf Pharmanager are

a. Number of patients in the system

b. Number of providers in the system.

Other goals will include

c. number of visits under Pharmanager infrastructure

d. cumulative value of products/services under Pharmanager infrastructure

e. number of partnership under Pharmanager infrastructure

This KPI will be done on a zonal, regional and demographic basis so we can see aspects for improvements and continuation of successful approaches.

Health information sharing and data analysis. To build a population-based systems, transparency and open source protocols must be the standard operational procedure. Its not just that we are building a health system but we are developing an open source system that allows anyone build their healthcare business on our healthcare infrastructure. Consequently, they can tap into all the benefits of the ecosystem via partner-patient information sharing, procurement solutions. 

Our provider infrastructure is built on a web and desktop app while our patient app is built on mobile technologies.

One business problem that most providers encounter in IT systems usage is network timeout in low resource environments. We have ensured that our platforms are able to work in such circumstances due to the use of IndexDB of up to 300MB of local data storage.

5

9 months

As a population-based healthcare company, we are focused on access for all. Specific funded programs and roles in the company are tailored to specific groups of people nevertheless.  

Software fees: For providers to use the internal practice management softwares, there is an implied cost for them.

Partnerships fee: For partners to onboard another partner as a business collaborator on our B2B marketplace, there is an implied cost.

Sales to patients and providers: For providers and patients purchasing supplies from us, there is a markup for us.

The main source of our revenue will come from medical supplies sales and software fees. We believe that the more providers that we onboard, the more our sales potential for us as providers must be well stocked for patient care services. The main drawback to this is that our revenue potential will be impacted by the prevailing macroeconomic conditions of Nigeria (which means we need to explore developing nations with more positive macroeconomic situations like in North and Southern Africa, Latin America Middle East and South East Asia).

The positive is that healthcare is a basic human need that is unnegotiable when needed so people in need will always pay for it.